I read Joseph Heller‘s Catch-22 a long time ago. Back in the time when trying to work in the video game industry here in Colombia seemed like a fool’s errand. Now that times have changed, I am usually confronted by a lot of people who want to understand what the hell it is that I do every day. And I can’t help but to think of Joseph’s Heller’s novel.
Truth (and perhaps beauty) lies not in the answer itself, but in the fact that this answer has evolved every day since I got myself involved into this mess. I guess a lot of people go through the same process; or at least I hope so. It is a process that erodes certainty. It transforms the designer from puppeteer to trader. What happens if we remove X or Y mechanic from the game? Would it make the game easier to understand? Does it make it too repetitive? What would ultimately benefit the game? All of these decisions seemed like a Catch-22 at first.
I guess what all of us involved in making games are constantly striving for is balance; a sweet spot of difficulty, puzzlement, and tension. If you guys could take a game you love, say Monopoly, and wanted to modify it so that it would become more challenging, what would you do? Would you increase the price of rent? Would you limit moving to just one die? Would there be no get out of jail free? All of these choices might work at a first glance. But all of them come with a trade-off. All decisions that we make affecting game mechanics will impact our game somewhere else. Some judgements are better than others, and there are many ways to increase the odds of making better decisions. Some people get better in time as they gain experience, others as they become more and more informed. It is not easy, but then, if it was, it wouldn’t be this fun.
Fortunately for us here at Brainz, there is a sense that we are getting better in understanding the trade-offs in every design decision. And that makes us feel a little bit saner every time we transform our preconceptions of what and how the game should be. And that is what I do. My trade, is trade-offs.
